“Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles spreading up through her arm as she read her way through Richardson's Clarissa.”
― Atonement
― Atonement
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.”
― Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
― Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
“Twenty-two poems covered the period from Lev’s first serious efforts to his arrest in 1948 at the age of nineteen. Very Mandelstamian, I adjudged: well-made, and studiously conversational, and coming close, here and there, to the images that really hurt and connect.”
― House of Meetings
― House of Meetings
“[in the]..curious way that my idealism has been mixed with my fatalism, so that I can possess the soul of a dreamer and that of a cynic at the same time......I possess a power of magic...[to] destroy the balance of a well-designed destiny with my diabolical mind.....”
―
―
“إذ لم يكن من المرغوب فيه أن يكون لدى عامة الشعب وعي سياسي قوي , فكل ما هو مطلوب منهم وطنية بدائية يمكن اللجوء إليها حينما يستلزم الأمر.”
― 1984
― 1984
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